Houses and homes

My friend Suzanne and I went to look at open houses on Sunday. She has a big house in the Berkeley hills that she wants to sell, and we were checking out the comps to give her an idea of pricing. Which is always weird. Some houses are so unappealing that you want to shoot yourself at the idea of living in them (Jerry and I still talk about a "suicidal green box" on Everett Street that we looked at in 1976), but SOMEBODY buys them. And then for the same price, there'll be a house that's easy to imagine yourself living in, given some paint and maybe some new light fixtures.

Sunday's houses were no different:

House A--Old and enormous, but not in a pleasing way. There were stairs and steps and numerous odd roomlets, as though a drunk had laid it out and thought, oh, what the hell, how about a useless little room HERE? The house was elegantly staged on the first two floors and featured the original unpainted wood trim, but it had none of the fashionable and expensive finishes you'd expect in a house that cost more than $2 million. Eventually, semi-lost, we found ourselves in a renovated attic where you'd have take off your head to wash your face, so steeply angled were the bathroom walls. Really. You could not bend over the sink without knocking yourself out. There was a deck off the living room, but a live oak blocked the bay view, and unless someone felt brave enough to whack it in spite of stringent Berkeley tree laws, so much for THAT.

House B--A mid-century house so drastically remodeled that it is virtually new AND on a status street. Gorgeous wood floors; broad hallways; a logically laid-out floor plan; bay view; mature and inventively landscaped back garden; decks; and in the middle of the house, like a jewel, a courtyard viewed through floor-to-ceiling windows from nearly every room. Evidence of thought, taste, and money everywhere. We managed to pump the realtor for her opinion of the price and the history of offers. She seemed bored enough to tell us, maybe because she's hosted Sunday open houses there for a period of 150 days. Too expensive for the current market, apparently, and the owners don't want to back down on the price.

We switched to houses Suzanne could possibly move into, smaller and not so high in the hills:

House C--A mercifully un-tampered with mid-century with a bay view and a water feature bubbling away in the backyard. Not as pristine as House B, finishes not as recent nor as elegant, realtor not as well-dressed but very thin. The house would work for Suzanne, but first she has to sell her own. House D bordered on suicidal: a small bungalow right on top of its neighbors, no view, one cramped room after another, tiny kitchen, and the bathroom smelled. Suzanne wanted to leave right away.

See what I mean about pricing? The first two houses were comparable in price, but only the second one (the dreamy "B") was livable. The second two houses were priced within $100,000 of each other, but House C was do-able and House D definitely was not.

Suzanne is still puzzling over what price to ask for her house. I'm wondering who bought that house on Everett in 1976 and WHY?